Letter to Supervisor Kim About the Importance of Accurate Information in Campaigns

Thank you for your letter earlier today, in which you suggest that our campaigns agree not to disseminate any campaign communications referring to each other or to the other candidate’s record.

As an initial matter, we were surprised to receive your letter, given that you ran an intensely negative, false, and misleading campaign against Supervisor Wiener in the primary. Through digital ads, email blasts, and mailers, you aggressively attacked Supervisor Wiener, including a brazen lie about who was supporting him financially. You also defamed Equality California, the largest LGBT civil rights organization in California. It’s odd, at best, that your campaign, after engaging in such negative and defamatory campaigning would then turn around and insist that we not engage in factually accurate campaigning about each other’s record and not even mention each other’s names, no matter what the context.

Before we can consider any pledge, we insist that you publicly apologize for and retract your false statements about Supervisor Wiener and Equality California. Until you set the record straight, there is nothing to discuss.

On the larger issue, we question why you believe it is a service to the voters to allow either of us to have a monopoly on portraying our own records to the public, with no opportunity for the other side to point out contrasts or differences in policy. While we understand your desire for the voters not to learn about your complete record – as opposed to the information that you, and you alone, choose for them to learn – we believe the voters are best served with diverse sources of information, including from the opposing campaign.

We would be more open to this proposed pledge if we had any confidence that you would fully and accurately describe your own record. An issue-oriented campaign is most effective when the voters receive accurate information about both candidates. Your campaign’s communications about your record have been neither complete nor accurate. For example:

You campaign heavily on your support for renters, yet you are closely associated with, have accepted campaign contributions from, and have carried significant water for Academy of Arts University, perhaps the worst code violator in San Francisco and an institution that purchases rent-controlled apartment buildings and turns them into student dorms.

You tout your support for women, yet you voted to reinstate Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi after he was convicted of domestic violence.

You tout your support for housing, yet you have opposed thousands and thousands of units of new housing to ease our housing crisis, including your support for the Mission Housing Moratorium.

You state that you forced developers to provide 40% affordable housing in their developments, yet the actual percentage is 20%.

You campaigned on your support for Bernie Sanders, yet you previously had endorsed Hillary Clinton, only to switch your endorsement so that Senator Sanders would promote you.

We look forward to a spirited and thoughtful summer and fall campaign, one in which both sides provide the voters with accurate information about the issues so that the voters can make a fully informed choice about whom to support for State Senate.